Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember putting stuff like this on my resume "developed X using visitor pattern" . ppl would ask "what is your favourite design pattern" in interviews. lmao.
Lol the worst pattern
“Big ball of mud” is a good one
Domain expertise has always been the real moat
251–260 of 592 posts
Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat
#252How much pontificating needs to be done before people acknowledge nobody has any idea what to do with AI on an individual level? First being good developer and learning how to use AI was sufficient, next it was being able to design architecture, then it was “taste” that made all the difference and now being an expert in the domain is the only thing that matters really. Until AI is basically in a stable, predictable,…
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Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat
#253How much pontificating needs to be done before people acknowledge nobody has any idea what to do with AI on an individual level? First being good developer and learning how to use AI was sufficient, next it was being able to design architecture, then it was “taste” that made all the difference and now being an expert in the domain is the only thing that matters really. Until AI is basically in a stable, predictable,…
An idea that's beginning to solidify for me is that AI tools make software development harder . It's harder because they dramatically raise the bar for what's possible to do. An individual developer can take on significantly more challenging projects now, because the ultimate constraint has always been time and AI can help you get more done in the time available. But the stuff you can get done with that time is a who…
That's true but in a way it's also more fun and engaging because the tedious stuff just gets worked through leaving you to think about the bigger picture items.
Though I'll say I don't buy the stuff about AI "democratizing" development since making it much more capital-intensive kind of has the opposite effect for anybody doing dev work at home.
Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
An idea that's beginning to solidify for me is that AI tools make software development harder . It's harder because they dramatically raise the bar for what's possible to do. An individual developer can take on significantly more challenging projects now, because the ultimate constraint has always been time and AI can help you get more done in the time available. But the stuff you can get done with that time is a who…
I worry this is looking at where the ball is now instead of where it's going. The recent disproof of an Erdos conjecture should put to rest the idea that LLMs will reach a skill ceiling before they reach superintelligence. I believe we are headed for a world of superintelligent AI where LLMs are much better at logical thinking than humans, the same way that chess engines are much better at chess than humans. In that…
I personally don't see that much sense worrying about this scenario because if it comes true then it doesn't really matter what I do.
Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
An idea that's beginning to solidify for me is that AI tools make software development harder . It's harder because they dramatically raise the bar for what's possible to do. An individual developer can take on significantly more challenging projects now, because the ultimate constraint has always been time and AI can help you get more done in the time available. But the stuff you can get done with that time is a who…
You will never beat the vibe coders. The vibe coders have a key advantage you don’t: they don’t give a fuck. They blow through a task and move onto the next one. Management sees this as progress, and the vibe coders are rewarded. When shit breaks later on down the line, and fires have to be put out and things rewritten, the vibe coders do NOT get the blame. They do NOT get punished. Most engineering teams operate on…
This will invariably be a problem in organizations where tokens, lines of code, PR count etc are the metrics - which happens to be in most places. I do not know if there are metrics or rewards for maintainable code, OR penalty for write code that breaks down and causes product incidents down the line. By then those engineers would have been promoted and moved on to better things.
Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat
#256How much pontificating needs to be done before people acknowledge nobody has any idea what to do with AI on an individual level? First being good developer and learning how to use AI was sufficient, next it was being able to design architecture, then it was “taste” that made all the difference and now being an expert in the domain is the only thing that matters really. Until AI is basically in a stable, predictable,…
An idea that's beginning to solidify for me is that AI tools make software development harder . It's harder because they dramatically raise the bar for what's possible to do. An individual developer can take on significantly more challenging projects now, because the ultimate constraint has always been time and AI can help you get more done in the time available. But the stuff you can get done with that time is a who…
> If you're worried about non-technical vibe coders taking your job, the correct response is to be much better at building software than those vibe coders. That means you need more skill, more ambition, and more experience. It's hard!
This is a false fear. The real risk isn't that some 19 year-old vibe coder is going to replace you, it's that there's simply less need for more experienced engineers. The market is shrinking.
Also, even if the premise behind the SaaSpocalypse is naive and oversimplified (companies aren't going to replace all their SaaSes with internally vibe-coded replacements), it looks reasonable that net-net AI will have a negative impact on the value of software.
Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat
#257Perhaps the good news is that even the best spreadsheet-slinging accountant in the west would still going to need some programming experience to do their verification.
I mean, they could ask an LLM "what does this code do, and will it always X when Y", but that's just nesting the verification problem inside another verification problem.
Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
An idea that's beginning to solidify for me is that AI tools make software development harder . It's harder because they dramatically raise the bar for what's possible to do. An individual developer can take on significantly more challenging projects now, because the ultimate constraint has always been time and AI can help you get more done in the time available. But the stuff you can get done with that time is a who…
You will never beat the vibe coders. The vibe coders have a key advantage you don’t: they don’t give a fuck. They blow through a task and move onto the next one. Management sees this as progress, and the vibe coders are rewarded. When shit breaks later on down the line, and fires have to be put out and things rewritten, the vibe coders do NOT get the blame. They do NOT get punished. Most engineering teams operate on…
> The vibe coders have a key advantage you don’t: they don’t give a fuck. They blow through a task and move onto the next one. Management sees this as progress, and the vibe coders are rewarded.
This is a complete unrealistic assessment. Who do you think vibecoders are? They are yesterday's software developers using today's tools.
The people who manually write their PRs are also not giving a fuck when they break production code with spaghetti code that later has to be thrown out and rewritten. They are the same people.
The key difference is that now their output volume is much greater, and they iterate much faster. They roll out plenty of bullshit, but it also hits the fan much faster and triggers fixes at a higher rate.
People hate on vibecoders because they do exactly what your average developer does but at a much higher rate.
Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat
#259The software generalist described in this post has domain expertise as well. In software. If you’re a great generalist software engineer today, you aren’t jumping to some random domain to escape AI. Software is your domain. You’re sticking with it as it expands and transforms.
Exactly, plus you now have a new superpower with AI — the ability to dig into and ramp up expertise in mostly any domain. I’d say the article gets it backwards.
Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
That might be true in the short-term, but I'd be very surprised to see that hold for the long-term. We've had plenty of technology trends in the past that have promised faster development but has later turned out to have problems. Organizations that stick around learn lessons about what works and what doesn't. If in a year's time organizations aren't feeling severe downsides from all of the unreviewed vibe-coded junk…
If the vibe coders are right I would give at least 90% of the credit to all the well made libraries, rules, and best practices that developers have built up over the decades. That’s what is embedded into LLMs and what might be the saving grace of slop code bases in the future.
> (...) rules, and best practices that developers have built up over the decades.
It seems you are not understanding that the reason all these "rules, best practices" had to be created in the first place was the fact that your average old times developer was churning out shit code and weaving spaghetti just as hard as today's vibecoders.
Those "rules, best practices" spawned from the same evolutionary pressure as today's instruction files, skills, custom agents, etc.
Why do you think one of the first AI features rolled out by GitHub was the automatic code reviewer?
You guys are talking as if everyone working on software before 2020 was this immaculate developer with pristine sense of architecture and style. No, they were not.